tag:www.kickstarter.com,2008-10-09:/projects/2059856091/power-up-the-modern-retro-shmup-for-xbox/postsKickstarter: "POWER UP" - The modern retro SHMUP for PC and Xbox!2015-03-25T09:38:38-04:00tag:www.kickstarter.com,2008-10-09:Post/11775522015-03-25T09:38:38-04:002015-03-25T17:16:13-04:00Psychotic Psoftware - Update 91 (Power-Up for iOS)<p>Hiya guys,</p><p>Well it's been a while since the last update eh. This full time work has certainly taken up a lot of my time and the chaos is probably not going to let up any time soon, because for those who haven't heard yet, sometime between the end of May and early June... I'm going to be a dad!</p><p>I know right?! Jo and I are having our very own little boy, and we're chuffed and anxious in equal measure! ...But ace as this news is, and fun though the intricacies of my personal life are, that's not why we're here today. So let's get to it.</p><p>Remember way back when I ran this here Power-Up Kickstarter? Well, I mentioned that I wanted to get the game to other formats, starting with iOS. I even used the extra money from the campaign to pay my friend at 2-Bit Games to do the job.</p><p>Since then, 2-Bit has become no more...</p><p>In fact, he's joined up with a group of other developers and formed the awesome Playing With Giants, who agreed to finish Power-Up iOS as their first project, and guess what?!</p><p>It's almost done!</p><p>Sure, I pitched in with my art and music, but Power-Up on iOS was coded up from scratch and really is their baby... or at least, their much more experienced... but younger..... brother of my...... baby... Hmm, I'm getting a bit baby-brained with these metaphors (Which reminds me, I must get that nursery ready). </p><p>Let's just say that Power-Up for iOS is going through its last weeks of testing and the guys at PWG are looking to launch the game for iPhones and iPads everywhere on April 9th.</p><p>You heard it. April 9th!</p><p>AWESOME!!</p><p>If you're an iOS minded type then you'll be pleased to see that their first trailer is currently up and running on YouTube, and I for one was very happy to find that it keeps very nicely to the style of the trailers I made for the game myself a year or so back. Here's the link.</p><p><a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cIfLmAamVlw" target="_blank">http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cIfLmAamVlw</a></p><p>And finally, the guys at PWG are also available on Twitter. If you'd like to get more info on the iOS version of the game first hand, or if you'd like to maybe check out their other upcoming games, you can get hold of them here: </p><p><a href="https://twitter.com/pwg_dev?lang=en" target="_blank">https://twitter.com/pwg_dev</a></p><p>Do give em a follow!</p><p>Right, that's my lunch break over. Back to the day job. Have a good one guys, and when I find the time, who knows, maybe I've got a few more little one-man games in mind. ;)</p><p>Watch this space...</p><p>m</p>tag:www.kickstarter.com,2008-10-09:Post/9866332014-09-15T16:06:18-04:002014-09-17T07:44:30-04:00Psychotic Psoftware - Update 90<p>Hi All,</p><p>It's the end of an era. Here comes the final update in this series.<br>Enjoy... </p><p><a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S0LpHeVwv6o&amp;feature=youtu.be" target="_blank">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S0LpHeVwv6o&amp;feature=youtu.be</a></p><p>*Don't forget you can follow my ongoing progress on Twitter - <a href="https://twitter.com/psypsoft" target="_blank">https://twitter.com/psypsoft</a><br>*and on facebook - <a href="https://www.facebook.com/PsychoticPsoftware" target="_blank">https://www.facebook.com/PsychoticPsoftware</a></p><p>m</p>tag:www.kickstarter.com,2008-10-09:Post/9738762014-09-03T13:30:44-04:002014-09-03T19:05:56-04:00Psychotic Psoftware - Update 89<p>Hi all,</p><p>You wouldn't believe how busy I've been! If I told you, you just wouldn't.<br>I'll try to condense it all down into a short text based update nonetheless. Let's see.....</p><p>You might have noticed that this little update is a tad late.<br>Usually I post on a Monday, but this Monday I wasn't here. Let's start at the beginning.</p><p>Last Friday was the launch day for Power-Up on Steam! ...And launch it did but not without loads and loads of prep followed by loads and loads of things to sort out. </p><p>At the start of the week I had Power-Up downloading from Steam and running nicely on my home PC. "Safe" I thought..... then it occured to me that my home PC, this PC is the PC I made the game on. The PC I installed the XNA Framework's redistributable on for the purpose of running Power-Up.</p><p>"Better be sure it works for everyone" I thought, and with my partner, Jo's permission I set about Steam-installing it on her laptop. It fell over, asking where the flip the XNA drivers were. Now to a seasoned techy person this wouldn't be a problem, but I had a lot to figure out.</p><p>Still, I'm glad I found this little problem when I did. As it happened I needed a day or so to play around with Power-Up builds and to eventually come to the conclusion that the most elegant solution I could offer was to packege the XNA Redistributable as a second download option from Steam, which seems to have worked nicely. So I'm happy.</p><p>Now, there were two other issues outstanding and only a few days before the big release deadline. I'd already tried and failed once to run the acheivement system. The SteamWorks backend was great. I had 42 active/inactive acheivement icons uploaded complete with descriptions and everything else reqiured to get them running... I just couldn't get those bad boys working in the game.</p><p>I gave myself one of those last days to attack the C# steamworks wrapper thing and to adjust my in-game code to the best of my abillity. However, no matter which angle I came at things from, I just could not get my acheivements to unlock.</p><p>I really hope that the good people at Valve provide some better guiding documentation on that side of things for C# developers soon because at the moment that's a pretty tough nut for the entry level coder to crack.</p><p>I had to draw a line under that one. Bummer... but not forever I hope. With a bit of luck, one day I'll come back to that and get those achievements working.</p><p>One area I was confident about was the Trading Cards, though admittedly I haven't tried unlocking any yet. See, that just hooks into the Steramworks back end and those little fellows unlock when you play for a while. It's 20 minutes per card to be exact and there are 15 cards of some of the game's various baddies. As usual with Steam games, there are five badges which unlock each time you complete the card set, topping off with a sixth ultra-badge. </p><p>Gotta catch em all!!</p><p>As a part of the Trading Cards element I also designed a set of Power-Up backgrounds and emoticons to unlock as you go. One of these days I'll get 20 minutes to play through the game and unlock something myself. ;)</p><p>And that was it! Time up! Launch day!</p><p>I set my date and time expecting it to auto launch automatically at 9AM Pacific time. Late afternoon here in the UK, then set off for my FIRST DAY AT WORK!!</p><p>I know, right? How bad was my timing on that? In my defense, the start date came at rather short notice, but perhaps I should've considered that as my new job is in accademia and that the accademic year starts in early September, well, things were gonna get a bit tight. </p><p>As it was, I didn't and needless to say, when I left my induction it was to throngs of friends and followers on Twitter asking me "where the flip is Power-Up??" I felt like a right Mooey, I can tell you. I dashed to that railway station and spent the hour and a half journey pacing around the carriage, willing the train to somehow break its timetable and move faster.</p><p>When I got home, all I had to do was boot up my PC, go to the site and hit "Launch" but maaaan, we live and learn right? Next time I'll know. ;)</p><p>And THAT was last week!</p><p>---</p><p>So next week! What's still to be done? And how does my new job affect things?<br>Well, let's get to that.</p><p>I'm not going to start my next project just yet.<br>In fact, I'm going to have a bit of a hiatus. <br>Yep. you heard that right. I'm taking a break. </p><p>Remember when I started Power-Up? ...Well those fo you who do will remember that I was working full time. Tuesdays and Thursday evenings were mine to make my little game though, and Power-Up was born.</p><p>Well after New Year, I'm hoping to get back to a similar routine with a new game.</p><p>I'm doing two part time jobs at the moment and they make up full time work. In one I'm working as a casual mobile games artist for my friends at Lightwood Games and POWGI, and in the other I'm proud as punch to be the Sector Skills Champion for the Studio School in my hometown of Liverpool. Sure, I've only done my first week which was basically a couple of days to settle in and see the place, and sure, there's loads to suss out but I'm really looking forward to sharing some of my experience with the students and helping them to pick their direction in the industry. </p><p>That doesn't mean I'll be shirking my Psychotic duties. I'll be finding two evenings a week to get the slate clean for next year's big project, but admittedly, that slate-cleaning won't be as fun as a nice new project... here's what I've got lined up for my Psychotic evenings this year.</p><p>1. Honour my commitments to everyone who already bought Power-Up everywhere but Steam.</p><p> If you bought Power-Up before the Steam release then you showed faith in me and I really don't want you to have to buy it twice. I've set things in motion for everyone who bought the game on a bundle and am in the process of ordering the right ammount of keys for each and every one. I'm hoping to have the majority of this monster task done before the week end of the 13th/14th of September, but if you're still waiting round for a Steam code after that, throw me an email at <a href="http://mailto:psychoticpsoftware@gmail.com" target="_blank">psychoticpsoftware@gmail.com</a> and I'll make sure you get yours direct from me.</p><p>As for my Power-Up Kickstarter backers, I'm also in the process of sending each and every one of you a Steam key as a little extra Thank You. I'm about 1/3 of the way through those as er, I'm doing it by hand. </p><p>So bear with me. I won't let you go without!</p><p>2. Release Flix The Flea for PC. </p><p>There's loads to do here and I'll be getting in touch with some of my favoutrite PC distributors to discuss a pre-Steam PC release for Flix (assuming it gets through Greenlight, of course). I'm going for the £1 price point with this one as it's a smaller project than Power-Up, though it does have bags of charm and I'd love you guys to keep upvoting it on Steam. </p><p>I've got quite a to-do list on Flix which includes, but is not limited to setting up some merch for the site, making the soundtrack available, and now I've got my ITIN, maybe I can even get Flix and Power-Up onto iTunes before the month's out.</p><p>3. Get Power-Up all sparkling on iOS and Android</p><p>2-bit Games has done a stellar job in getting the body of the game ready for me and we've managed to get all of the levels working and scrolling nicely. If you remember back, framerate and jumpy backgrounds was an issue in multiple resolutions. Those issues are all but sorted now, but there are basically three major issues remaining, and the ball's in my court there.</p><p>a. the 640x1136 version currently uses quick fix graphics which are all a bit too fat for it. I'll be getting all the assets for that version to basically match the 640x960 version, except for the static backgrounds of course, which will be custom built for that resolution. I'll also be giving every other resolution the once over to make sure thate are no graphical rogue-bludgers in the resizes.</p><p>b. Get everything paced right. This includes bullet speeds, shot rates enemy energy and pretty much every variable value in the game. Balancing this for iOS is no mean feat and probably one that I'm best suited for having done the Xbox/PC versions. </p><p>c. Get set up as an Apple developer so we can start device testing. This is basically a cashflow thing and once I've been paid this month I'll be hitting that one. We've got a brilliant QA Lead with loads of experience who 2-bit and I have both worked with before and I know he won't pull any punches when it comes to the quality of the game. </p><p>I've also got a well known publisher for the iOS version. They're keen and have every belief that we can pull an awesome iOS version out of the bag, so once we're running on device I'll be getting a build to them in the hopes of moving forward there. Until then, that's as much as I'm saying.</p><p>2-bit tells me that getting Power-Up to Android from there isn't such a big step, so hopefully that'll be happening before the new year too... but you know the score. The further ahead of ourselves we get, the rougher the plan.</p><p>---</p><p>Now, all good things must come to an end, and in two weeks I'll be doing the last in this line of fortnightly updates. I know, it's gonna be wierd without em, right?</p><p>The thing is, each one, typed or filmed takes somewhere between two and four hours to get done and out. when I was working five afternoons a week, that was sustainable but during periods of two evenings a week... well, put it this way, If I do updates I'll have very little to tell you as a quarter of my time will be taken up with well, updates! </p><p>Nuff said really.</p><p>I will wrap up 2014's Power-Up/Flix Updates with a final video in two weeks time that will re-itterate the plan(the exact day depends on my availabillity though), but don't worry. We've been here before. Remember those early days? I'll still be on twitter loads and loads, and facebook too.</p><p>...not to mention that next year I'm gonna start on a lovely new juicy Power-Up sized project, and probably the odd little Flix The Flea sized one as well. I'll keep you posted. ;)</p><p>---</p><p>Now, speaking of my Twitter and Facebook, if you're not following, please do. you might like it.<br>Here are the links... </p><p><a href="https://twitter.com/psypsoft" target="_blank">https://twitter.com/psypsoft</a><br><a href="https://www.facebook.com/PsychoticPsoftware" target="_blank">https://www.facebook.com/PsychoticPsoftware</a></p><p>Right. Better go. Jo's just very kindly made my dinner and I've still got loads to do! :S<br>Catch you in a couple of weeks for one last video update!</p><p>m</p>tag:www.kickstarter.com,2008-10-09:Post/9564912014-08-18T11:01:28-04:002014-08-18T21:36:14-04:00Psychotic Psoftware - update 88<p>Hey, Y'all! <br>The latest update is mostly about Power-Up and the mind boggling world of Steam Achievements! </p><p><a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XwGxgC5Cvqc&amp;feature=youtu.be" target="_blank">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XwGxgC5Cvqc&amp;feature=youtu.be</a></p><p>Enjoy!<br>m</p>tag:www.kickstarter.com,2008-10-09:Post/9392062014-08-04T10:04:37-04:002014-08-04T19:02:24-04:00Psychotic Psoftware - Update 87<p>Hello there,</p><p>How've you been? <br>It's been busy as always here juggling that part time day job of mine with getting Flix all ready for my Kickstarter backers. Thursday 25th was my self imposed deadline for the job and the week leading up to it was all about meeting that deadline.<br>Basically this was a case of making sure that the Flix game and soundtrack were ready for download while my signed prints were packaged up and set to go as soon as I got paid.</p><p>It had also occurred to me that a new blog post on the production of my little games was well overdue and I really wanted to have that done and out by the 31st. I spent Monday and Tuesday afternoons on that, and as I had yet to cover the subject of sound/music at all despite fielding a few requests for a post on that subject, I thought I'd oblige.<br>The result is a concise, if not occasionally rambling, but generally rather fun foray into the general whys, the wherefores and not forgetting the hows with regards to coming up with the sounds and music for Flix The Flea... not to mention a big plug for the soundtrack which I'll be releasing along with the game in September... hey, if I don't plug it, who will?! ;)</p><p>This was my main job for last week and you can read/hear that here on Gamasutra: <br><a href="http://www.gamasutra.com/blogs/MikeHanson/20140730/222202/Flea_Sounds.php" target="_blank">http://www.gamasutra.com/blogs/MikeHanson/20140730/222202/Flea_Sounds.php</a></p><p>Or here on my own little blog page "Psychotic Pspeaks" if you prefer: <br><a href="http://psychoticpsoftware.blogspot.co.uk/" target="_blank">http://psychoticpsoftware.blogspot.co.uk/</a></p><p>Once my blog was checked, checked again and finally posted (then checked again), I got myself back to the task of honouring those Kickstarter commitments. With a bit of money in the bank I popped round to my local post office and got those Flix The Flea signed posters off to their rightful owners. <br>Thanks very much for those who dropped me a line to let me know they'd arrived safe and sound. I especially loved the photo from @BravadoReign of it on your wall. Cheers for that! Made me smile no end to see Flix out there in the world. (Photos of your Psychotic goodies are always welcome and shouted about.)</p><p>As Flix is very much hot off the press I had a feeling that a few glitches might come back to me... and they did. I think I've probably got very used to playing Flix myself. I'm at that point with it where I can pretty much work my way through every level, collecting everything and generally racking up the points as I go, completing the game in rapturous style... which of course, is no good for testing it. </p><p>New players have approached Flix's gameplay with a much more explorational approach and comparitively less knowledge of the game's quirks. Needless to say, some of my new players found some pretty serious game stopping bugs (thanks for the reports guys), and some of those have taken a fair bit of thought to resolve.</p><p>Most potent was a wierd little anomaly in which Flix can hit his head, then fall backward through bits of the scenery to get well and truly jammed in the bottom left or right corner of a level. I won't go too far into detail, but suffice to say, I think that this week I found the main cause of that little fella and with a bit of luck I've got it completely removed from the game.</p><p>Some folk were also having issues with the game starting up in full screen (which it's not supposed to do at all), throwing the art assets all over the place! How rude!! </p><p>Incidentally, if you're a backer and your current copy looks less then perfect, do grab a latest copy of the game from the usual place and let me know if anything goes awry. It works fine at my end but there are a million ways to play a game and I'm sure I haven't covered them all. The official release is september so there's plenty of time for me to sort out the vast majority of anything you unearth.</p><p>That, and a few other minor bugs pretty much took up the entirety of last week. Really... I literally did an update of it just today with the last of those fixes. ...Come release day, of course, Flix will be just as perfect as Power-Up and nobody'll ever know that anything was ever wrong. ;)</p><p>In the meantime, if you're a backer who's playing and loving Flix, or if you're just liking the look of the game and would like to play it in the not-too-distant, you can always help vote it onto Steam over at this link.<br><a href="http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=249162423" target="_blank">http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=249162423</a></p><p>---</p><p>So with that covered, let's look at what's coming up this week...</p><p>Well obviously, I'll be keeping a bit of time asside to recieve and resolve any outstanding issues with Flix The Flea. I'll probably mostly be compiling any bugs into a list to be fixed later in one big sesh though as the next thing on my list is a bit all-encompassing and has a deadline which comes before the release of Flix The Flea for PC.</p><p>Yes! You guessed it! ...this week I'll be prepping Power-Up for it's long awaited release onto Steam!</p><p>With a projected release date of Friday August 29th, this basically consists of two major tasks for the month ahead:</p><p>1. Most importantly, getting the game to the point where it's ready to go on sale through Steam (but of course).</p><p>2. Second, Getting Power-Up integrated into Steamworks in a meaningful way. Less essential but very desireable... and probably rather difficult for an amateur coder like me to accomplish. For this reason, I'll be giving myself plenty of time to get my head around the task at hand. I remember that it took me about two weeks to figure out save data in an XNA game... surely this won't be as much of a headache right?? </p><p>Well, we'll see about that, but if I can get Steam to recognise certain achievements within Power-Up, like the defeat of bosses, the completion of chapters or the beating of the game on its various difficulty levels, then I'll be a very happy bunny. At the very least, I'd like the unlocking of a new Weapon-F paint job to trigger a Steam award of some sort. We'll see how far I get with my aspirations here, but I'm hoping that a couple of weeks should do the trick. Certainly, if the job is just beyond my skills at this point, I'll know within a coulpe of weeks.</p><p>And speaking of ship unlocks, that brings us to a third job, which actually takes a higher priority to either of those two tasks mentioned above and will pretty much constitute the majority of this week's work... </p><p>After discussing a few things with 2-bit about the iOS release of Power-Up (which incidentally, I'm hearing looks brilliant on device and is coming along nicely), I've decided to carry over a rather good idea of his over from his iOS version of the game and into the PC version. Basically, each unlocked ship comes with one extra notch of power up on its weapons at the start of the game, adding more than just a paint job to each ship and giving the hard working player a starting advantage.</p><p>At the moment it looks like these upgrades will be spread accross the weapons, so ship 2 might have 2 notches on the laser, ship 3 would have 2 notches on both the laser and the spread, and so on. I'll be testing the water with that this week, but I've a good feeling that it should work rather well.</p><p>I think I've also completely sorted the one remaining very rare but nasty crash bug from the PC version too, though I'll be making absolutely sure this coming week when I revisit the Power-Up code... actually, that's something I haven't laid eyes on since, what, March? ...wow. It feels longer than that! wonder if I'll even recognise that explosion of beginner's code. :S</p><p>---</p><p>Finally, don't worry if you've bought Power-Up from somewhere that isn't Steam. I've got pretty good at keeping track of things. I have a nice list of everywhere I've distributed the game through and all those versions will be getting updated in line with the Steam version shortly before or after the release.</p><p>Also, and I know I keep banging on about this, but I don't want you to miss it... if you bought your copy of Power-Up from another PC distributor, you're also entitled to a Steam version. Just drop me a copy of your receipt or something via email (to <a href="http://mailto:psychoticpsoftware@gmail.com" target="_blank">psychoticpsoftware@gmail.com</a>) and I'll get you a code for your Steam version too... although it's probably worth waiting for the Steam release before you do that. If you do it earlier than that, chances are I'll be far too busy getting the game ready and I'll just go and lose your email between now and the release, being the shambolic little one-man outfit that I am. ;)</p><p>---</p><p>And there we are... Right!<br>Lots to do. Better crack on. See you in two weeks for the video update! <br>...wonder if I'll suss all this complicated Steam stuff out on time?! Wish me luck! :D</p><p>m</p>tag:www.kickstarter.com,2008-10-09:Post/9212412014-07-21T10:13:48-04:002014-07-21T10:14:17-04:00Psychotic Psoftware - Update 86<p>Well well. Fancy seeing you here! </p><p>Still, as you're around, why not make yourself comfortable and watch my latest video update. It's about Power-Up iOS progress, Flix bug fixes, and honouring my commitments to my lovely Kickstarter backers. </p><p>Enjoy. <br><a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0TBIV9B3suk&amp;feature=youtu.be" target="_blank">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0TBIV9B3suk&amp;feature=youtu.be</a></p><p>m</p>tag:www.kickstarter.com,2008-10-09:Post/9026012014-07-07T10:50:53-04:002014-07-07T10:51:24-04:00Psychotic Psoftware - Update 85<p>Hey everybody,</p><p>It's not been my most vocal couple of weeks on Twitter, Facebook, etc, and that's really because my workload increased quite a bit. Here's why...</p><p>As you may have heard, after a good long six months of campaigning, Power-Up finally made it through Steam Greenlight. I was informed about this last Thursday... actually, not the one just gone, the one before, and believe you me, despite all the hard work and gradual progress, this still came as a bit of a surprise.</p><p>There I was with a loose three month plan and a load of commitments I'd already made, when the opportunity to jib off everything else and possibly make some easy money from a quick Steam release of Power-Up came completely from left-field.</p><p>That Friday and the week end that followed saw me in a bit of a dizzy state, caught between doing a bodge-job of getting Power-Up ready for Steam while sumiltaneously finishing up on my commitments to my Flix The flea backers, AND dealing with the graphics optimisation needs of 2-bit games (who as we know is working hard to get the iOS and Android versions of Power-Up done). Basically, as you'd expect, I was making a bit of a pig's ear of it all.</p><p>I had to stop and take the good old step back, re-arranging my plan and compromising a bit in all quarters to ensure that it all got done in a relatively timely manner and to a good quality. And here's the conclusion I came to...</p><p>I decided that I needed to look at my commitments and the progress of all of the afforementioned games and versions, then come up with some rough dates by which I'd like to see them released. </p><p>First and foremost, I'd already made a commitment to my Flix The Flea Kickstarter backers that they'd get their copies of the game, the soundtrack and the signed posters around the end of July. Flix is also close to completion and as I don't have to rely on anybody else, its completely under my control to get done. This became priority number one and the main job for July.</p><p>Next up was Power-Up PC for Steam. I'm told that this is where I might stand to finally make some money from Power-Up so it stands to reason that I'd like to get it out as soon as possible. As I've now been given the Greenlight to release the game on Steam, you might think I'm being stupid for not shoving it out the door straight away. Well, here's the thing. Yes, I like money, but I also want you to like the game, and as Steam is such a big deal, putting the game in front of so many people, I'd like to put the extra time in to clear up a couple of minor glitches that came up since Power-Up's innitial release, and maybe even add just a little more depth to the mechanics. Nothing major. But as an example, 2-bit suggested that unlocked ships should be a little more powerful than previous ships, and I'd like to experiment with that.<br>At the very least, I'd really REALLY like to learn something about Steam awards, incorporating Steamworks and that sort of thing into the game. Sure, I might not be able to do it all, but I'd certainly like to try. I think that four weeks or so should be enough to give me a fair whack at it, putting a potential release for a really good version of Power-Up on Steam at the end of August.</p><p>Then, throughout September, I intend to be putting the finishing flourishes to Flix The Flea, looking into distribution avenues, and generally getting the game out there by late September.</p><p>After all that, you'd think I'd be done, but no... </p><p>This is when my attention will turn to completing on Power-Up iOS, Android and hopefully Ouya. I'm intending to get those all done and out before the year's out too! ...Phew!</p><p>Obviously, ity's currently not as simple as JUST prioritising on my Kickstarter commitments for Flix the Flea, then moving on to the next job. There's still an element of multitasking. 2-Bit has needs in order to progress with his version of Power-Up and the Steam process needs plenty of investigation before I carry it through. With that in mind here's what I got up to last week.</p><p>The first job was to plan out all of the above and get it on paper. It was a head scratcher, but I got there. </p><p>Next up was to look into just what I'd promised my Kickstarter backers on flix the Flea. <br>1. The Game - Well, that's a given really. And ongoing until the end of July, but the major jobs on flix consisted of a complete redo of the sound effects, a nice juicy buglist, figuring out how to optimise the game down from over 300MB to somewhere closer to 50MB, and a load of other minor, less pressing improvements. <br>2. The Soundtrack - written, produced, and in the game... at least a version that was vaguely optimised and loopable as level background music was finished. What I needed here though was a high quality version which works as a standalone product to listen to, output in both FLAC and MP3 format. The soundtrack needed box art so would also overlap with the next task which was...<br>3. The Key Art - You know, like with Power-Up, Flix needed a proper hi-res box art piece, capable of being printed at A3 for my Kickstarter backers' posters, and capable of being rearranged for game box art, cd box art banners, and every other situation in which someone might ask for Flix The Flea Key Art. Elements of this would also be used to enhance the game's front end, not to mention its Steam, Desura, IndieDB pages, etc.</p><p>And that's what I set out to do. Taking into accout my morning day-job, I basically split my afternoon in two, and one of those two jobs over last week was to prep Flix's cover art for all of the above while getting the entire soundtrack done and ready to send to my backers. I'm picking up the posters from the printers later today, but so far, so good.</p><p>At the beginning of last week, I had a shout from 2-bit. After a lot of hard work and a bit of umming and aah-ing, he'd got his head around a good way of getting that framerate up on Power-Up iOS and came back to me with a good idea fo how he wanted to do the backgrounds. My second afternoon job last week was to provide all of those backgrounds, layered up in parralax, but nicely optimized so that it would look pretty decent in ALL resolutions from 2048x1536 to 480x320. It was a lot of work, but is turning out rather nice. </p><p>Finally, as I mentioned, next month I'll be going into Power-Up for PC, all guns blazing with a view to getting it onto Steam. So with that goal in mind, I spent any spare hours I got last week along with the occasional evening looking into the protocols, getting my bank and tax details sorted with them, reading up on the whole Steamworks thing and generally getting started setting up Power-Up's store page. I'll be chipping away on the prep for that between now and August so that I can get as much productivity as possible out of the month leading up to Power-Up's release on Steam.</p><p>And don't worry if you bought Power-Up anywhere else. When it's out on Steam, just drop me a line with your receipt and you'll be entitled to a Steam code for it too.</p><p>---</p><p>So as you can probably tell by that somewhat chaotic little stream of consciousness, last week was an equally chaotic one which left me feeling a bit squiffy. Mainly, it was all good... I mean, getting your game on Steam can only be a good thing, right? but all that excitement certainly shook me up a bit and it was something of a struggle to stay organised.</p><p>But I have, and this week should be slightly easier, gradually bringing things back into a nice steady working rythm. Now that those Flix the Flea Kickstarter peripherals are done, I can start to focus on the game again and those big jobs I broke it down into. The biggest of said jobs will undoubtably be those sound effects.</p><p>When I first made Flix, back before Power-Up, it was a little Bubaboo the Flea remake, and I'd literally captured the 3 beep noises from the original spectrum game for jump/hit-head/land.<br>When I evolved my little demo into my own 10 level game, I'd already programmed a few audio cues in, which were quickly replaced with my own sounds Jump - Me twanging a ruler on the desk / hit-head - me going "ow" while thumping my fist on the desk / land - me slapping my hand gently on the desk.... Yeeeeaaaaaaaaaaah. That needs an update. While these simple sounds along with a few more simple sounds were great for me to get a general feel for the game's atmos, I'm now in a position to expand a bit on them, and I've made a massive list of sounds that the game needs done properly.<br>In short, I'll be spending Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday making sproings, bumfs squeaks and squawks in a variety of tones and emphases, then post producing all of those sounds consistently to take place in a deep dark spooky cavern. On Friday, I'm planning on expanding on my game's code to include all of the new sounds with a view to adding a bit of variety and bags of charm to Flix The Flea... then if you're lucky and I'm not feeling too rushed, the following week I might even write an in depth blog about the whole process, not to mention a bit on how I made the music.</p><p>However, while I've got all my backgrounds in for Power-Up iOS, that's not to say my work there is done. Ohno. This week I'll also be finding the time to have a good play of Power-Up iOS, albeit on an emulator, just to weed out all of the biggest glitches that currently stop the game from feeling like the Xbox/PC version. It's not a bug hunt by any stretch of the imagination. We've got a testing process in mind, but this is just a pre-testing thingie. A chance for me, the creator of the original, to flex my ego a bit and dig up all of the port's most glaring problems. There aren't that many, mind. Now that the backgrounds are in it's starting to look like a very decent version and once the sound and music is in I'm sure it'll get even better. Then, when proper QA people get hold of it on device, I know they'll beat it into shape, but I'm sure I'll find plenty of things to improve on before it gets properly to testing, and I'll be having a look for those this week.</p><p>So that's it. I'd better get to it eh... There's plenty to get on with. But before I do, here's a quick summary of those release dates... remember, these aren't in stone. But I'm going to really go for them and they're looking pretty likely at this point.</p><p>*Flix The Flea - Kickstarter backer commitments: The Game, Soundtrack and signed posters will be going out around the end of July (though some posters will probably be going out early August... money and all that).</p><p>*Power-Up - Big Steam release. Fri 29th August. - I'll also be ending the updates on the Power-Up greenlight page.</p><p>*Flix The Flea - PC release. Fri 26th September. - I'll also be ending the updates on the Flix Kickstarter page.</p><p>Now, it takes a lot of time repeating these updates to lots of different Steam/Kickstarter campaign pages, so as you might have noticed, I'll be ending the updates from each of my respective campaign pages as and when I complete those campaigns. For example, as Power-Up gets its Steam release, I'll stop updating the greenlight page. That said, as I won't have met the Kickstarter commitments until I get the iOs/Android versions out, the Kickstarter updates will continue. </p><p>You can always follow my ongoing Text and Video updates though from my Facebook, Twitter and YouTube pages, all of which are accessible through <a href="http://www.psychoticpsoftware.com" target="_blank">www.psychoticpsoftware.com</a></p><p>Thanks for taking the time to read the update. I'll see you in a fortnight in video format!</p><p>m<br></p>tag:www.kickstarter.com,2008-10-09:Post/8870872014-06-23T12:31:52-04:002014-06-24T04:01:26-04:00Psychotic Psoftware - Update 84<p>Update time! This one's about Flix posters, PowerUp iOS framerate optimization ...&amp; Topsy in the garden! </p><p><a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fEJJAVAq1sQ&amp;feature=youtu.be" target="_blank">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fEJJAVAq1sQ&amp;feature=youtu.be</a></p><p>Enjoy,<br>m</p>tag:www.kickstarter.com,2008-10-09:Post/8709372014-06-09T10:37:51-04:002014-06-09T10:38:27-04:00Psychotic Psoftware - Update 83<p>Hey you! </p><p>Is it that time already? Looks that way, and have I been a busy chap this last week. </p><p>Once I got all of the Power-Up sounds and music packaged up and sent over to 2-bit Games, with a pretty concise list of how-stuff-works and where-stuff-goes, then left him to it for a bit, this last week was then almost exclusively about Flix The Flea!</p><p>First of all, I decided that it was time to do a trailer! </p><p>One hurdle here was the simple fact that the video capture software I'd bought to create the Power-Up trailers simply wouldn't work with a non-DirectX/OpenGL game. Flix is a game of this persuasion and so I've had to hunt for and test lots of alternatives... free ones too, as money's tight!</p><p>The upshot of this is that I'm yet to find something that captures at over 20-or-so frames a second. I know, how hard can it be, right? It seems the answer to that question is "Very... It can be very hard to find." Not to worry though. I'll continue to explore and experiment in that department. In the meantime I've managed to find something that does a half decent job, and hopefully, by the time I get to the release trailer I'll have found something much better still that actually does the game's framerate justice... It's all part of the learning process.</p><p>What I have managed however, is a rather spiffing Flix trailer with a little bit of backstory, some gameplay from a selection of the game's levels, and all playing along to segments from the actual game's finished spooky-but-catchy soundtrack. Ace!</p><p>I'm hoping to release that this coming Friday to promote the Flix The Flea Steam greenlight campaign (which is underway but has been somewhat overshadowed by the Power-Up one and the Flix Kickstarter so far).</p><p>Next up, I'd deliberately left one of the game's more complex in-game backgrounds until late in the day as I really wanted to do something of a timelapse of it... you know, a video showing four hours of me making a level from scratch, but condensed down in high-speed so that it only takes up ten minutes or so.</p><p>This sort of thing went down really well with some of the Power-Up backgrounds and spaceship models and there's a bit of a library of those over on my YouTube channel if you're interested...</p><p>Alas, with Flix, my dream of sharing this background creation process with you was not to be. It comes down to this... I'm out of practice. See, I did record the process. the WHOLE process... in, er one sitting. With no stops. Like a div! Of course, when I hit save, my clunky five-year-old PC ran out of memory and fell over, losing everything. Hrmph!</p><p>It's a schoolboy error and if you don't put stuff like this down to experience, you go nuts... so I did. Sure, I've done this timelapse capturing before, and during the creation of my Power-Up timelapses I did indeed break down my processes into saveable, bite-sized hour (ish) long chunks of recorded activity, opting to edit them together later.</p><p>The trouble is that it's been so long since I last did a timelapse that I downright forgot the process, and Flix was already so far along when I decided to finish and release it that now I've got no more backgrounds to create and timelapse for your entertainment. Damnit!</p><p>But who knows. If Flix generates a sequel, you mght even one day get a timelapse or two of me making my backgrounds for that. </p><p>On the upside, the general backgrounds (minus a bit of detail here and there) are all in Flix now and ready to go.</p><p>On top of these two major jobs I've also had a number of smaller jobs to contend with. I've compiled a pretty much complete list of required sound effects which includes all those currently in the game, many of which are quick temporary jobs which I plan on replacing in the not too distant.</p><p>I've added a few visual effects too, such as a dirt-fall effect for when Flix lands hard or arkwardly, say, on a rough bit of terrain on which he needs to correct his footing, or say, when he hits just a tiny bit too far off an edge and slips off. He also perspires when nervous. This generally happens when a monster is near. Flix's face expresses a touch of anxiety while he throws off little beads of perspiration. A subtle and purely garnishy touch, but a fun and charming one nonetheless, and something I always wanted to do. </p><p>Finally, Once again, I've battled with, and defeated my old nemesis, Savedata. I managed it in XNA with Power-Up, but for years, doing Savedata in a Director game elluded me, and more often than not I'd end up with a horrible computer-crashing mess. No more! It seems that my experience with Power-Up has indeed left me at least a more tenacious and daring (if not better) programmer and after a relatively minor struggle I had Flix saving the High score. </p><p>Sure, it's not much, but its a very good start. If I get time, I'll have a think about other ways I could use my new found powers of saving.</p><p>But there's ever less time, and still quite a list of things to do. speaking of which...</p><p>---</p><p>This week I'll be adding a few new features to Flix: firstly, a new monster type... Bats. The bats will be smaller then the birds and while they pose no threat to your lives, bouncing into one will knock Flix off course in the middle of a well aimed jump and into the scenery, back to the bottom, or even worse, straight into the gob of a passing bird!</p><p>The bats' creation will consist of a drawing and coding pass so will probably take a couple of days. I'm also hoping to add up to three of them in a level, each with a slight variation in colour. The addition of these along with the increasing number of birds and more complex terrains should help to gradient the difficulty level of the game as Flix progresses.</p><p>I'm also planning to do a detail pass on all the game's backgrounds. Now I've got the basic art in it's much easier to see where textures start to look repetitive or where there's simply big areas in need of something special. I'm hoping to saaaay, add some vines to the level made up predominantly of purple rocks and accents of jungly leaves in the hopes of making it feel a bit more like a jungle themed level. I'm planning on adding knots and gnarls to the treetrunk level wherever I feel a patch might benefit from it. And where there's a large spot of repeating tile on the rocky backgrounds, I intend to create a set of boulders to cram into the mix and visually shake things up a bit, while levels with structures will have missing bricks and dark patches aplenty for a bit of variety.</p><p>After all that, on Friday, I'll be releasing the first Flix trailer (though as I've already edited most of that, you won't see the extra background detail in action just yet. You'll have to wait for the release trailer in a few months for that). </p><p>Also, my office was getting horribly messy and cramped, especially with it being storage while we had that living room floor installed, and by Friday night I'd plain had enough. Long story short, I pulled it all to bits and spent my week end re-structuring (again). I love it, but I'll need the rest of this afternoon to get it finished. Still, I managed to get my signed bob Wakelin prints from Replay Blackpool up, so a childhood dream has been finally realised. I also had one of my Power-Up posters framed too, y'know, for the ages.</p><p>...and that pretty much brings us up to spot. </p><p>---</p><p>Oh yeah, I've just updated my site <a href="http://www.psychoticpsoftware.com" target="_blank">www.psychoticpsoftware.com</a> to feature my latest news story about Power-Up making it into EFG's boss book "The Art and Design of Video Games". <br>Who'd-a thought my little game would make it into a book?! </p><p>I was totally blown away with their presentation of my stuff and their hard backed book makes a very pleasing artifact to my little bookshelf. There's also loads of great indie games in it with words from their creators on their influences and processes. Brilliant!</p><p> If it sounds like your thing do pop over to my site and follow the link in my latest news story.</p><p>Well, shameless self promotion out of the way, thanks for checking in. I'll be back in two weeks with a video update and hopefully loads more progress to share! </p><p>m</p>tag:www.kickstarter.com,2008-10-09:Post/8566832014-05-27T11:24:27-04:002014-05-27T11:25:47-04:00Psychotic Psoftware - Update 82<p>Hi folks,</p><p>This update's all about graduate shows, iOS art fixes and getting started on a new game soundtrack.</p><p><a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WrICOfuhQD8&amp;feature=youtu.be" target="_blank">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WrICOfuhQD8&amp;feature=youtu.be</a></p><p>Enjoy...<br>m</p>